Six people, one monitoring service

Tern started in Leeds, UK, in 2021. Maren Okafor, our engineering founder, and Tobias Lind, our product founder, had spent too many evenings piecing together failed checks, alert messages and status updates. They wanted one record that the next person on call could read without asking who had seen what.

What we build

Today we are a six-person company. Tern checks websites, APIs and scheduled jobs from Frankfurt, London, Virginia, Oregon, Singapore and Sydney. Paid checks run every 30 seconds; Free checks run every three minutes. We ask a second region to confirm a failure before alerting the person on call, and public status pages show the current service state.

Our work covers the check workers, the application, alert delivery and the pages people read during an incident. Email, SMS, phone calls, team-chat webhooks and signed webhooks give teams a choice about where those alerts arrive. The plan limits are published on the pricing pages.

How we work

We use a shared on-call rota and leave written handover notes. Each week, we review incidents, support questions and checks that produced confusing results. Maren leads engineering; Tobias leads product. The rest of the team works across development, design and support, and all six of us contribute to the weekly review.

We work from Leeds with room for remote days and focused work. Product changes start with a problem we can describe in a few sentences. We try them on our own checks, explain them in the changelog and keep the settings small enough to understand during a difficult evening.

If something in Tern is unclear, email hello@tern.example.com. A useful question from a small team often tells us more than another item on our feature list.